1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for adaptive user settings. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for non-invasively collecting user configuration preferences and customizing a page of data based upon the user configuration preferences.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has changed the way that a business attracts and retains a customer. In many cases, a customer's exposure to a particular business is solely through the business' website. In this situation, the business' website is the business' most important asset for establishing customer confidence and loyalty.
With that said, a business attempts to organize its website by displaying items that are most interesting to a customer on its home page such that a customer is not required to click through multiple layers in order to view the items. For example, a customer may be interested in a popular children's toy and if the customer does not see a link to the toy on the business' home page, the customer may not spend time “clicking” through the business' website in order to find the toy. Rather, the customer may visit another business' homepage that displays the toy on its home page.
A challenge found, however, is that it may not be apparent to a business as to which items are of most interest to its customers and, in fact, items of interest may be different for each customer. For example, a user that visits a sports website may select a tab corresponding to his favorite team. In this example, it is difficult for the website administrator to determine which “tab” should be displayed first since each user's favorite team may be different. Also in this example, each user may wish to scroll to a particular section of a web page based upon his interest, such as a team's history, a team's current league standings, or a team's player statistics, each of which may be located at a different area of a web page.
Furthermore, when a user visits a particular web page, the user may wish to view the same area within the web page at subsequent visits. A challenge found, however, is displaying a web page that is customized for a particular user based upon previous visits without requiring human interaction at either the customer's client or at the server that is hosting the web page.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method to non-invasively collect a user's web page viewing preferences and use the collected viewing preferences to provide a user with a customized web page view upon subsequent visits.